Eye Tracking and User eXperience, Steemit

Recently been thinking about user experience on Steem apps that I have been developing (eSteem mobile, desktop wallet app, SteemPoll, etc.)

User experience is very important topic and it contributes to user retention greatly. In this post, let's do some experiment about Steemit.com and how is your experience with it... One of the main focus of UX developers is to guide user through the interface with ease and without additional cognitive loads. Also Marketing and UX experts mostly think about things like does user's attention goes to right places, where user is looking and how long, what part of interface they miss.

There are numerous eye tracking studies that show how effective it can be and how to improve it. You can google eye tracking studies to learn more but in this post let's explore and get your input on few things.

Example

Order of focus is defined with stripes from dark shade to light

If it takes slight effort and moves your attention from one spot to another which means design/flow is not working properly and can use improvements. Even if it was intention of design, is it emphasizing or showing right things to user to keep them on site... Let's find out...

Feel free to share screenshot to illustrate your attention movement OR explain with few words where have your attention diverted, I am sure it will be helpful to improve site...

Steemit needs to be "prettier" -for lack of a better word- if we want more people to use it. Busy looks better, but it's impossible to create a post, it's so frustrating. At least Busy has a nice design. The look of Steemit hasn't changed since i joined last July, and it needs a better design.

the clean and "distraction-free" view, to borrow from WordPress here, is one of its major advantages and one additional reason making it so much better than cluttered Facebook and the likes. So, guys over at Steem, be careful to not lose this important "selling point" in an attempt of "making it pretty" (it already is)!

More important would be certain usability functions (like Searching inside Steem for certain posts etc, still haven't figured out that one, or is it just me...?) and possibly an easier sign-up process (it's not a coincidence that Twitter and Facebook make this soooo borderline-idiotic easy as the know a thing or two about marketing and conversion rates -- if nothing else :) though).

Agreed, I really like the clean white theme too however I think the site is a little bit too raw, it doesn't look like a finished product. It's possible to have both a clean and pretty interface, look at medium. Sometimes you just have to add a few details to make it look slick and polished, I also hope that with the new communities feature users will be able to personnalized their page like reddit, it makes it more inviting and lively.

If not "prettier," at least more "modern" looking. The current format is a little on the "early 2000s message board" side. It doesn't bother me severely; at least it's pretty uncluttered... but a "general" user will expect more features to be in evidence.

(1) First I saw the title ("Welcome to the Blockchain!") and 2nd the "Sign Up" button. BTW the title felt a bit confusing to me, I would expect something like "Welcome to Steemit, a blockchain-based social media" or something like this, more specific to Steemit. Also I've noticed that the "Sign Up" button could be wider to compete better with the "Learn More" button.

NOW YOUR TALKING! This line of inquiry is sorely lacking in the dev community in general. What this post does is conduct a very important series of "experiments", albeit fairly rudimentary, but designed to gather information about what users find important.

What a breath of fresh air to see such ideas discussed let along trending here on steemit. I truly hope the UI devs of steemit (and other projects) will internalize the ideas you have presented here and act on them by doing similar and more in depth characterization of their UI designs. To get an optimum UI / UX such testing and experimentation is necessary, and the wider the audience the better quality the information gathered will be.

In our rush to complete the tasks that provide features, this aspect of design has largely been lost. It's old school UI design. Also the pressure to "get on with it" so profits can roll in is also a factor. Good design takes time. Good marketing takes research on who you intend to market to.

Thank you good-karma for such an important article. Also glad to see the huge payout I see here. Great job!

Experiment 3:
My first thing to check is the no of followers. I do this naturally when viewing social media, for example, twitter/Instagram to see credibility. Then I check the Posts headlines to see if the content someone provides is good or spammy. Hope this helps.

in the front pages, I again look at the headlines and i see many Bitcoin/currency related posts. More than 50% is always about cryptocurrency getting popular , their price movement etc. I think we need a bit of diversity. Especially in the front page. Maybe some kind of algorithm to limit same keywords to max 20% of posts. Or something like that.

I like the idea of having a set limit to the number same keywords on trending page. I think it's important to have some diversity on topics and authors that show up there, IF we're after maximizing Steemit appeal/ growth.

Hi,
I tried experiment #2.
I opened 3 different posts and found that every time my eyes travelled towards the pictures that had yellow or red in them. I guess it's because our brains are hard wired to see those or maybe it's because we are taught that those mean danger or pay attention. Thanks

The steemit experience would be great with a new interface but that is less of a priority in my opinion. Reddit is ugly as can be but the quality of its features allow it to thrive. Steemit needs to nail this community feature on the head soon.

For text based posts - Steemit should provide a Medium like experience. There is a reason so many writers enjoy posting and reading there. Clean text and formatting is key.

I agree that reading as well as writing experience is the major driver. Although there are small bits which contributes to that like font type, edges of fields, coloring etc. Every one is eagerly waiting for communities feature which I think will be huge and allow you to browse/find different content more easily...

I may not be a good test subject because an "another life" I was a tech in a usability lab for an OEM, but let's go anyway.

Experiment 1: Before the page loads, I'm looking at the autofill to see if it brings up steemit. It does. Hit enter.

First place my eyes go is top... "Welcome to the Blockchain." Most valuable real estate on the page.

(side note: That's a change-- it used to be top-left, when we had predominantly left navigation.)

Experiment 2: Eyes top to the title; then shift to study user's avatar.

Experiment 3: Eyes top to center of the blue header bar, to your username-- most contrasty and visible. I noticed here that my eyes actually "swept" there from loosely looking at the space in the blue above the word "Blog." Old habits, I guess... based on where I expect the "bang" on the page to be.

Another piece of random commentary: I'm an older user (mid-50's) with nearly 25 years doing things online. The thing I am struggling the MOST to adapt to (af all web changes over the years) is using web sites clearly designed for mobile... on a desktop or laptop. I still have to remind myself to scroll down when all I see on the page is a solid block of color with two words (or NO words) sitting there... and I'm thinking "Where's the effing web site???"

I appreciate the minimalistic look, but let's for God's sake have at least a little visible navigation, or something!

What I found from my experience is that the Reply icon should be a bit more prominent. This is the same with the Resteem icon. As it is now, nearly every time I go to post a reply, which isn't too often due to this fact, I have trouble finding it. An annoyance at best, but still something that takes away from user experience.

Once I'm logged in, my eyes never stray from the top right corner to see notifications. It's quite compulsive :/
More generally, I love the simplicity but agree Steemit should be graphically sexed up a little bit and perhaps a bit more personalized, e.g. having favorite tags appear on top. I'd also like to see a mobile Steemit app that played on the Instagram model, but with the crypto thing. Imagine getting paid to be a narcissist.

I've been using your app gk. And what strikes me is that it is not the interface that is laging. It is the rendering of pages and the fact that it feels sluggish. It might be my aging iPhone 5s. But compared to safari it is slow. It has lots of other cool features though like checking my voting power. Is it some way to make it faster?

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